Forum Moderators: open
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible ; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)
(thats a cut and paste)
IP ranges, here's some examples:
172.213.159.**
172.201.131.***
172.188.155.***
172.202.5.***
172.212.129.***
172.216.177.***
Now, having experienced Firefox's FasterFox extension recently, and the browser accidentally tripping the bad bot trap I wondered:
a) has AOL implemented something similar, US only? And if so how to detect?
b) or if this is a bot with a rogue user-agent? And if so what would people recommend to catch it from the details above.
c) anything else I might have missed?
[edited by: volatilegx at 3:00 pm (utc) on Dec. 13, 2005]
[edit reason] obscured IP addresses [/edit]
1.) If an AOLer has their own ISP account they can subscribe to AOL's 'bring your own access' type of membership (unlimited use for less $/month).
Because they can run any browser through their AOL connection and the IP address will be one of AOL's, there's a good chance that your robotic hits come from someone actually running a bot.
2.) The UA is suspect because of the space *before* the semi-colon. If someone has doctored the UA string (doable in any number of bots, browsers and FF extensions), then chances increase that the accesses coming from -- or perhaps more correctly, running through -- AOL are bots.
At least with that atypical string, you can mod_rewrite the UA into oblivion -- until someone catches on and changes it.
3.) With strings almost commonly (let alone maliciously) malleable nowadays, and rogue and/or robots.txt-abusing bots increasingly rampant, I'm looking into installing some sort of bandwidth throttle module, m'self. If you're an Apache user, you might want to, too.
thankyou.
